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Technorati Tags: George W. Bush, Iraq war, propaganda, Rachel Maddow

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According to The New York Times, the more than 500,000 ethnic Koreans living in Japan are a major focus of hate for these Japanese Tea Partiers, dubbed the “Net far right” by the Japanese press.

The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.

Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.

While the US Tea Party has yet to stoop to such outrageous lows, the leader of the organization associated with this action, 38 year-old Makoto Sakurai, admits his affinity with his American counterparts:

Mr. Sakurai says the group [Zaitokukai, which means Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan] is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.

Of course, there is nothing new in using the tactics of fear and irrationality in place of engaged, informed political activism — especially in times of true crisis.  I’m not saying the rest of the world never imagined such things before the Tea Party came along either.  But we do see a direct connection, and admittedly so.  The Japanese version differs mainly in tone.  In America, there are no references to the targets of the growing anger and discontent as being “cockroaches” or “barbarians.”  Yet so much of the Tea Party outrage is directed toward some sort of “otherness”: Mexican migrants, Muslims/terrorists, a President with a foreign-sounding name, Liberals/Socialists/Communists.

The Japanese Net far right are admittedly a tiny fraction of the entire population in that country, and the public there strongly rejects such groups.  But in America, a “kinder, gentler” version welds far more power and media influence — thanks in large measure to powerful financial backing that has an agenda all its own.  And this is my point here.

It goes without saying the economic crisis is real.  The discontent and anger are real.  The question becomes, what is the best way forward?  Do we take the easy way and harness these emotions into irrational scapegoating, leading to who knows where?  I hope not.

Technorati Tags: Japan, Korea, racism, Tea Party, Zaitokukai

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These videos were inspired by Spike Lee’s film Crooklyn.  In the closing credits of that movie you see the Soul Train line dancers getting down to contemporary hip-hop, so I thought I would share with you what I have made.  Enjoy!

First up is “Body Movin’” by the Beastie Boys. I didn’t include any effects on this one because I didn’t know how to at the time. But the edits are pretty good.

The music here is the song “Busy Child” by Crystal Method.” The edits are okay and the effects seem to work.

This one is just a big party. Public Enemy jamming out to “Fight the Power.”

And last is Outkast performing “Bombs Over Baghdad.” Hope you like it.

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No, Mr. Beck, Congress Did Not Print a Bible for the Use of Schools from Chris Rodda on Vimeo.

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I know this is from last week (sorry, been watching the World Cup), but it’s yet another Daily Show clip exposing the sorry state of the American mainstream media. Michael Hastings, with his Rolling Stone piece that led to the downfall of General McChrystal, showed these morons how to do real journalism and the best they can do is whine about how Hastings got so much access.

For more on this I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post on the subject.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, corporate media, McChrystal, Obama

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With the terrible environmental catastrophe currently taking place in the Gulf, I thought some good anti-oil industry propaganda was needed.  So here’s a website I came across with some good political art on the ecological, social, and imperial impact of global oil policy: Art Not Oil: A True Portrait of an Oil Company.  Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: BP oil spill, environment

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These are people accused of witchcraft.  This is a proper Old Testament punishment for them.  Way to go you Evil Hebrew god for condoning such barbarity.

Wow!  Isn’t God wonderful.  I wish he ruled our world.

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Jon Stewart on the recent CNN ratings woes:

CNN and fact-checking:

Hilarious hypocrisy:

Pointless journalism, “just saying…”:

CNN gives up:

Wolf Blitzer and the Olympic torch:

Rick Sanchez falls off the SS Verne Troyer:

Anna Nicole Smith and refrigerators:

Technorati Tags: CNN, media, The Daily Show

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Technorati Tags: Atheism, religion

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Greenwald begins by noting a paper Sunstein co-wrote in 2008 detailing how government should “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate‘ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government.”

Sunstein’s strategy of using propaganda reflects long-standing liberal ideas in American political culture.  In the early- to mid-20th century, liberal theorists like Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann praised the use of propaganda as a means of controlling public opinion, and Sunstein is simply carrying on this tradition.

But Greenwald is most forceful in pointing to the hypocrisy of liberals who are now defending the Obama Administration for committing the very same acts they were so outraged about when done under Bush — particularly the paying of conservatives Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to promote Bush Administration programs as implicit “independent” experts.  But now Obama’s Administration has been outed doing the same with Jonathan Gruber’s advocacy of the health care reform proposals.

Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”

I recommend reading the Greenwald article in its entirety.  Don’t miss it:

Greenwald: Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal

Technorati Tags: Liberals, Obama, propaganda

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